Although most students already find themselves wrapped up in a slew of class work, clubs, sports and other extracurricular activities, I urge them to utilize one resource on campus more fully — the Hopkins Center’s student workshops.
The center seems relatively unknown and underutilized. In fact, I spent my entire first year at Dartmouth without even knowing that Hop had a basement, let alone a large theater, a jewelry making studio, a woodshop and even a library downstairs. I might be particularly unobservant, but I think it is more likely that there are many other students like me who just are not aware of the range of activities that the Hop offers beyond the performing arts.
In particular, I am most familiar with, and have especially enjoyed working in, the woodworking shop. The Hop’s website says that the shop “offers a rare opportunity to learn woodworking from professional craftspeople,” and based on my firsthand experience, I can attest that this is greatly understating the workshop’s resources. They will not only teach you how to work with wood, but how to build just about anything you want to make — furniture, carving, woodturning, you name it.
Having absolutely no experience with woodworking, I doubted that I could start working on substantial projects when I started going to the shop. I was wrong. After learning basic safety and how to use the machines, I started to turn wood, carve, frame and dovetail cabinets. There are a plethora of lumber types to choose from, tens of thousands of dollars worth of professional machinery and often plenty of work space. Visitors are truly limited only by the bounds of their imagination. Unfortunately, I have mostly seen members of the local community or professors, rather than other Dartmouth students, working on projects in the shop.
Dartmouth should emphasize intellectual growth, but all too often this idea of intellectual growth is narrowly defined. Students whittle their definition down to include very little, outside of lectures, textbook reading and late nights in the library. If students want to be intellectually engaged, they should be willing to not only solve problems with their minds, but with their hands. The workshops offer students the chance to apply their critical thinking skills to something solid and tangible and exercise their capacities for creation and innovation. After working through a chemistry problem set or a long reading, it is easy to feel drained and frustrated. With woodworking, one makes mistakes, certainly, and one becomes mentally (and maybe even physically) drained, but there is a sense of accomplishment after creating something solid, even if it does not turn out exactly as first imagined. When I am not in the workshops, I seldom find this combined challenge to the mind and hand.
Had it not been for the innovative teaching style of my architecture professor last term (who for an assignment had the class design, sketch, model and build), I might never have discovered the woodworking shop. President Phil Hanlon has championed experiential learning as an important part of a Dartmouth education. I don’t think the College needs to invest heavily in new resources to accomplish more hands-on or experiential learning, so much as it needs to recognize the underutilized resources already on campus.
